Memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop
In a happy coincidence, today’s first reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians also happened to be the subject of my lecture on Monday. This remarkable text is one of the New Testament’s “Christological hymns.” Scholars say that texts like Philippians 2 very well might have been recited or sung in some of the earliest of Christian communities. That very fact alone makes reading it and hearing it a moving experience. We speak often of the Church over space and time, and here we have a text that brings us into the worship of our earliest Christian saints.
More than this, however, the text has some incredible things to say about Jesus. The hymn ends with a picture of all in heaven and on earth bowing at the name of Jesus. And yet, the picture that comes before this worship is no ordinary king or emperor. The part that speaks most to me is when Paul says that Jesus “emptied himself.” We should never lose sight of the fact that the way God incarnate acted in the world was through total, selfless love. The messiah people wanted was not the man hanging on the cross but a military leader to bring them liberation. Jesus upsets this entirely with his “self-emptying.” He gives totally of himself, enduring not only physical suffering but the humiliation of such a public execution.
What trips us up in the Garden—where we used to share friendship and communion with God—is our own desire for self-aggrandizement, for trying to make ourselves into gods. God’s own redemption and reconciliation with humanity comes, then, not through domination but through self-giving. Only a sacrifice of the self brings one back into communion with God and with other people. This beautiful hymn sums up the beauty and the surprise of God’s revelation in Jesus.
- Katherine Schmidt